Compliance and Making a Good Faith Effort
The Illinois Chiropractic Society’s free Statusfi dashboard helps members track compliance and reduce audit risks. Adrienne Hersh, JD, highlights its proactive benefits in avoiding penalties. Watch the video to learn more!
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Transcript:
Marc:
A little over a year ago, the Illinois Chiropractic Society launched Statusfi our compliance dashboard that we provide to ICS members at no cost. It is completely free, and let me make sure that it’s really clear. This is software that we developed for ICS members and have released at no cost. There’s no catch, there’s no reason to wonder if you’re going to get sold on anything. But we did. We released it because we wanted to make sure that our doctors had a tool that they could utilize to help with compliance. And so today, ICS General Counsel Adrienne Hersh has joined me to have a conversation about why are some really good reasons, from a legal standpoint, to use a tool that would help you track all of your compliance. We’ve had a number of different conversations, but Adrienne, is there anything right out of the gate that you want to just throw out there for our members?
Adrienne:
Sure, the first thing I would say is it’s obviously always better to to do these kinds of programs in advance, get them set up, be proactive, go through get your compliance done. The Stausfi tool, yes, you have to spend a little bit of time at it, but it makes it easy. It talks you through everything, and it’s very user-friendly, and you’re always better off being proactive and doing it up front and saving yourself regulatory actions or insurance audits or any other kind of audits, not to mention attorneys fees and other costs, potentially fines, things like that. So yes, I would always recommend doing it upfront, and you’re already it’s already included in your membership anyway. It’s a wonderful, phenomenal tool for compliance.
Marc:
So Adrienne, let me ask you a couple of things through this. Some of the resistance, some of the feedback that we’ve gotten from our members is they’re worried if they start to do this all of a sudden, it makes them aware of some of these requirements, and that makes them more culpable, right? It makes them have greater risk. Is there any truth to that?
Adrienne:
You know, if anything Marc, it’s really the opposite, because in my experience with the department, when I used to work there, with the board, they always took into consideration, even if somebody had messed up or they missed something, and they were then the subject of an investigation, the board always gave them grace and took it into consideration if they the minute they found out something was wrong, they took steps to cure it and to make sure that they had something in place, that it didn’t happen again. Again, Statusfi is a great tool for that. If you have an area that you’re getting questioned in, whether it’s by OSHA or by an insurance company, or by a regulatory agency, go on Statusfi, and get set up what they’re saying you’re lacking. You can’t rewrite history if you didn’t do it in the past, but you can potentially mitigate what the sanction might be if you do something right away to try and cure it. And that’s exactly what Statusfi would do in that case.
Marc:
Sure. You know, one of the things that I think is super important is the idea behind Statusfi is to put our doctors in a position where they never are. You know, they don’t have the investigation, right? They don’t have an audit, they don’t have an issue with a regulatory body. They don’t have an issue with OSHA or the Americans with Disabilities Act, or, you know, the idea is to avoid all of that.
Adrienne:
It’s the ideal world. Yes, right? That’s the ideal world. Yeah.
Marc:
What happens if, let’s say they’re using Statusfi? They’ve made an effort to go through and use it. Somebody from OSHA stopped by and said, Oh, well, you knew about this, right? You know? Why didn’t you do it all? Why did you only do a portion of it? How does that end up working a lot of times with the regulatory agencies and audits and things along those lines?
Adrienne:
Again, it weighs in your favor. If you’ve made a good-faith effort to use the tool and to do it in a way that is compliant, you will probably get, you’ll get some grace for that. You know, obviously, if you just sign up, or you sign up for the program and you never open it, it’s not going to work. But if you can show that you’ve made a good faith effort to use the tool and to comply with the steps that they say you haven’t complied with, it’s probably going to get counted as mitigation and may reduce your sanction. May even, you know, sometimes they can even close the case. They can say, we’ll give you a warning, we’ll close the case. But we’d like the fact that you put something into place right away to show that you’re making an effort and that this is not going to happen again.
Marc:
Yeah, it’s if you didn’t know, for those listening, the whole idea behind Statusfi is it’s all broken down into bite-sized pieces. What we tell our members is you don’t have to do it all in a week. You don’t have to do it all in a month. Instead, if you’re just do and take one bite one box, if you will, each week at the end of the year, you would actually achieve full compliance in the dashboard. And then it’s just maintenance. And it will remind you when you have things to do that is rock solid, good faith effort, right? That is really doing your best to be compliant. And the idea is, it’s paced, right? It’s take your bite, the old adage, right? How do you eat an elephant? It’s one bite at a time.
Adrienne:
It’s very true, and honestly, I don’t even know of another tool that can do this for our doctors, I don’t and it is included in your membership. And I wouldn’t say it if I didn’t really believe this, but because it breaks everything down, all these areas of compliance, I know it’s overwhelming. It’s overwhelming to me, and I’m an attorney, but it breaks everything down in a way that it makes it doable, and it really shows a good faith effort on your part to be a compliant physician.
Marc:
We’ll include some links down below the video, and hopefully, this helps you alleviate some of your concerns as to why you know you may be avoiding utilizing the tool in your practice, and encourage you instead to take the steps. Again, it’s free. We’ll drop the link down below. It’s, it’s, you’d simply just go to my.statusfidashboard.com, it’s a long URL, but again, we’ll include it down below, jump out there, and get the process started. It’s, a rock-solid piece to help you become more compliant in your practice and help you with some of those things that you may be avoiding and have avoided for all these years.
Adrienne:
And save money on those pesky attorney fees.
Marc:
And that too. Thanks. Adrienne, thanks for helping us out today. We’ll catch you next week. Bye.
